Page 45 of 56 Days
Only time will tell.
When Oliver opens the door he holds out a hand, presenting her with the set of keys that lie in his palm: one standard silver one that will open the door to the apartment and one small black plastic fob that will open the main door to the building.
“I would’ve put them in a gift box or tied them with ribbon or something,” he says, “if I had any.”
She smiles and reaches for them, and for him with her other arm—but he suddenly snatches his hand away and steps back.
A shadow of something unreadable crosses his face and then something more readily identifiable begins to fill it: embarrassment.
“Your hands,” he says to the floor. “Sorry.”
“Of course, yeah. I just forgot.”
She’s already turning toward the bathroom.
“I’m not trying to be a dick, it’s just with the asthma—”
“No, I’m glad you reminded me,” she says. “Really.”
She doesn’t quite understand why he tried tohand her somethingbefore he did it, but fine, whatever.
Before any resentment can bloom, she catches herself.He has asthma. That’s an underlying condition. Handwashing is something she should be doing anyway, whether he’s there to nag her about it ornot.
She pushes the bathroom door open with an elbow and goes to the sink.
As she sluices water over her hands, she feels something that wasn’t there before: a ridge of hard, dried skin on the outer edges of her little fingers. After she dries off with a hand towel, she rotates her wrists so she can get a better look. The skin there is peeling, red, and sore. Protesting. She makes a mental note to buy some hand lotion. This makes her think of going to a pharmacy, which makes her think of what else she might buy while she’s there, seeing as any sort of retail experience is a major operation now.
They’re talking about this thing being a dry cough, fever, aches and pains. Apparently some people get upset stomachs, too. She tries not to think about the nightmare of having too much coming up or too much coming outhere, in the only bathroom in Oliver’s apartment, with him right outside the door, and focuses instead on what might help if that happened.
Paracetamol, cough syrup, and some Imodium wouldn’t go astray... Maybe some of those dissolvable packet things you drink to replace your electrolytes, whatever electrolytes are. Antibacterial handwash, if they can get it—which she doubts. The shelves in her local Tesco have been empty of it for going on two weeks now.
She looks up, into the mirror, and notices another mirror on the wall behind her: the door to the medicine cabinet. She’s already had a snoop inside it—she did that the first night she was here—but now she opens it to take an inventory.
There are only two shelves and they seem to be mostly filled with personal products. A thickening shampoo. Razors. Shaving oil. Two boxes of condoms, one of which is open at one end and lying flat, so she can see there are only a couple left inside.
A blister pack ofsea-greenpills with the number542stamped on to them, mostly gone; she thinks they might be antihistamines. All that counts for medical supplies is a box of supermarket bandages and a tube of Deep Freeze.
A thought crosses her mind, unbidden, as she closes the cabinet door.
No inhalers.
She finds Oliver in the spare room, lifting her suitcase onto the bare bed. The air smells of furniture polish; he must have been cleaning while she was gone.
“I promise you I’m not paranoid,” he says when he sees her in the doorway. “Despite all evidence to the contrary.”
She waves a hand. “It’s fine. Really.”
The blind is all the way up, offering a view of the courtyard through the leaves of a tree, and the window has been opened a crack. She goes to it to get a better look and sees that a crack is as far as it’ll go; it’s a safety feature.
Oliver comes up behind her, puts his arms around her waist, and speaks into the fall of her hair.
“I just want us to be safe,” he says. “Foryouto be.”
“I know. Honestly, it’s fine. I want us to be safe too.” She twists around to face him and lifts her lips to his.
He kisses her once, briefly, and then pulls back to say, “Speaking of—you haven’t been kissing anyoneelse, have you? Is that why you wouldn’t let me come with you this morning?”
“I haven’t, no. But Ididlick all the buttons at pedestrian crossings between here and my place, so...”
